Books

Famed comic book writer and creator Jim Starlin revealed during a panel at the Nashville Comic and Horror Festival the he and other creative minds at DC comics used an internal vote to decide which character to kill in the 80s using AIDS.

Comicbook.com reports that the revelation came in a story Starlin was telling the crowd. In the late 80s Starlin had allowed fans to call in and decide if Robin should live or die in the Batman comic, “A Death In The Family.”

“When the AIDS epidemic first came to light, DC had this idea to do a book where one of their characters contracted AIDS and died from it,” Starlin told the crowd. “And so, being the nice sensitive subject that it is, they put out a suggestion box that you were supposed to drop in the name of the character that you thought should die from AIDS.”

Starlin said the majority of people voted for photograph Jimmy Olsen should be the one to contract AIDS and die. But because of who played Olsen in the Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve, the storyline was scrapped.

“That idea got scuttled when somebody told them that the actor who played Jimmy Olsen in the Superman movies was actually gay in real life,” Starlin said. “They got scared and they dropped the whole project at that point.” Ryan Dixon